Preface

An exposition of the different, but intimately related, dimensions of urban design, this book is an updated and revised version of a book originally published in 2003. Focusing neither on a limited checklist of urban design qualities nor, it is hoped, excluding important areas, it takes a holistic approach to urban design and place-making and thus provides a comprehensive overview of the subject both for those new to the subject and for those requiring a general guide. To facilitate this, it has an easily accessible structure, with self-contained and cross-referenced sections and chapters, enabling readers to dip in for specic information. The incremental layering of concepts aids those reading the book cover to cover. Urban design is seen here as a design process, in which, as in any design process, there are no right or wrong answers, only better and worse answers, the quality of which may only be known in time. It is, thus, necessary to have a continually questioning and inquisitive approach to urban design rather than a dogmatic view. The book does not seek to produce a new theory of urban design in a prescriptive fashion. Instead it expounds a broad belief in e and attitude to e urban design and place-making as important parts of urban development, renewal, management, planning and conservation processes. Synthesising and integrating ideas and theories from a wide range of sources, the book derives from a comprehensive review and reading of existing literature and research. It also draws on the authors experience teaching, researching and writing about urban design in schools of planning, urban studies, architecture and surveying.

our contention was that an urban design awareness and sensibility should inform all parts of the curriculum. The same is true of schools of architecture, property, real estate and landscape. Second, from a need to prepare undergraduate lecture modules presenting ideas, principles and concepts of urban design to support the programmes design studio teaching. Although many excellent urban design books existed, it soon became apparent that none drew from the full range of urban design thought. The writing of these modules generated the idea for the book and provided its overall structure.

The Books Structure

The book is in three main parts. It begins with a broad exposition of what is meant by urban design. In Chapter 1, the challenge for urban design and for the urban designer is made explicit. The chapter deliberately adopts a broad understanding of urban design, which sees urban design as more than simply the physical or visual appearance of development, and an integrative (i.e. joined-up) and integrating activity. While urban designs scope may be broad and its boundaries often fuzzy, the heart of its concern is about making places for people e this idea forms the kernel of this book. More precisely, it is about making better places than would otherwise be produced. This is e unashamedly and unapologetically e a normative contention about what we believe urban design should be about rather than necessarily what at any point in time it is about. We therefore regard urban design as an ethical activity e rst, in an axiological sense (because it is intimately concerned with issues of values) and, second, because it is, or should be, concerned with particular values such as social justice, equity and environmental sustainability. Chapter 2 outlines and discusses issues of change in the contemporary urban context. Chapter 3 presents a number of overarching contexts that provide the background for urban design action e the local, global, market and regulatory. These contexts underpin and inform the discussions of the individual dimensions of urban design principles and practice in Part II. Part II consists of Chapters 4e9, each of which reviews a substantive dimension of urban design e morphological,
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Motivation
This book comes from two distinct sources. First, from a period during the 1990s when the authors worked together at the University of Nottingham on an innovative undergraduate urban planning programme. Its primary motivation was a belief that teaching urban design at the core of an interdisciplinary, creative, problem-solving discipline, planning (and other) professionals would have a more valuable learning experience and a better foundation for their future careers. Although in many schools of planning urban design is still guratively put into a box and taught by the schools single urban design specialist,

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Preface

perceptual, social, visual, functional and temporal. As urban design is a joined-up activity, this separation is for the purpose of clarity in exposition and analysis only. These six overlapping dimensions of urban design are the everyday substance of urban design, while the cross-cutting contexts outlined in Chapter 3 relate to and inform all the dimensions. The six dimensions and four contexts are linked and related by the conception of design as a process of problem solving. The chapters are not intended to delimit boundaries around particular areas of urban design and, instead, highlight the breadth of the subject area, with the connections between the different broad areas being made explicit. Urban design is only holistic if all areas of action e morphological, perceptual, social, visual, functional and temporal e are considered together. In Part III e Chapters 10e12 e implementation and delivery mechanisms for urban design are explored e that is, how urban design is procured, controlled and communicated, thereby stressing the nature of urban design as a process moving from theory to action. Aspiring urban designers, especially those still in education, can often produce exciting visions and design proposals for the development of urban areas and the creation of (seemingly)

wonderful public places. The qualities of such visions may seem entirely self-evident and the case for their immediate implementation overwhelming. But this is a romantic, perhaps nave, view of urban design and place-making. We live in the real world and what appears entirely rational on paper is much more difcult to achieve on the ground. Furthermore, the reality is that implementation often fails in some way. Policies and proposals drift off course. Seen differently, however, they also evolve and develop through the implementation process. Stressing that places matter most, the nal chapter brings together the various dimensions of the subject to emphasise the holistic and sustainable nature of urban design. It is important to appreciate how urban designers (primarily those in or working for the public sector, but also others) can encourage, enable and sometimes compel better quality urban design in the form of higher quality development and/or better places for people. Rather than what urban design is or should be, the focus is how decisions become outcomes (ends), and the processes (means) by which this happens.

An Emerging and Evolving Activity

It is only recently in the UK that urban design has been recognised as an important area of practice by the existing built environment professions, and even more recently that it has been recognised by central and local governments. This has been marked by central government through urban design and place-making becoming more central elements of the planning remit. In the USA e in certain states at least e urban design has often been more fully conceptualised and better integrated into the activities of the established built environment professionals. Examining the planning history of cities such as San Francisco and Portland clearly demonstrates this. More generally, as in the UK, recent initiatives at both public and professional levels have combined to give urban design a new prominence e in the public sector, through the spread of design review as a means to promote better design through planning action and through the professions with the emergence of, for example, the Congress for the New Urbanism. In addition, urban design is the focus of well-developed grassroots activity, with local communities participating in the design, management and reshaping of their own local environments. Urban design is a growing discipline. There is increasing demand for urban design practitioners e or, more simply, for those with urban design expertise and place-making sensibilities e from the public and private sectors around the world. This growth has been matched by a range of new urban design courses at both graduate and undergraduate levels; by greater recognition in planning,

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ix

architectural and surveying (real estate) education; by a number of new urban design journals; and by a new demand from both private and public practitioners wanting to develop appropriate skills and knowledge. All urban designers, whether knowing or unknowing (see Chapter 1), need a clear understanding of how their various actions and interventions in the built environment combine to create high quality, people-friendly, vital and viable environments or, conversely, poor quality, alienating, or simply monotonous environments. As a eld of activity, urban design has been the subject of much recent attention and has secured its place among established built environment professions as a key means to address interdisciplinary concerns. In this position, it is a policy and practice-based subject, which, like architecture and planning, benets from an extensive and legitimising

theoretical underpinning. This book draws on that now extensive conceptual underpinning to present many of the key contributions aimed at benecially inuencing the overall quality and liveability of urban environments. Urban design has developed quickly and continues to evolve, even in the seven or so years since the rst edition of this book was written. It is hoped that the structure adopted by this book will continue to stand the test of time and that, over time, it will be able to incorporate other advances in thinking on the practice and process of urban design, and any omissions that e through our ignorance or lack of appreciation e we have not included. Hence, by contributing to the better understanding of good urban design, it is intended that this book will enable the design, development, enhancement and preservation of successful, sustainable and cherished places.

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Part I

Dening Urban Design

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Chapter 1

Urban Design Today

This book adopts a broad understanding of urban design as the process of making better places for people than would otherwise be produced (Figures 1.1e1.3). Four themes are emphasised in this denition: rst, that urban design is for people; second, the signicance of place; third, that urban design operates in the real world, with its eld of opportunity constrained by economic (market) and political (regulatory) forces; and fourth, the importance of design as a process. That urban design is about making better places than would otherwise be produced is, of course, a normative contention about what urban design should be rather than what it is at any point in time. Introducing and dening urban design, this chapter is organised into three main parts. The rst part develops an understanding of the subject. The second part discusses the contemporary need for urban design. The third part discusses urban designers and urban design practice. design conference at Harvard in 1956 and subsequently setting up the rst American urban design programme at that university (see Krieger & Saunders 2009). As a term for the activity, it replaced the more traditional and narrower term civic design. Typied by the City Beautiful Movement, civic design focused on the siting and design of major civic buildings e city halls, opera houses and museums e and their relationship to open spaces. Evolving from an initial, predominantly aesthetic, concern with the distribution of building masses and the space between buildings, contemporary urban design denotes a more expansive approach and, reecting the title of this book, has become primarily concerned with shaping urban space as a means to make, or re-make, the public places that people can use and enjoy.

Dening Urban Design

Containing two problematical words, urban design can be an ambiguous term. Taken separately, urban and design have clear meanings: urban describes the characteristics of towns or cities, while design refers to such activities as sketching, planning, arranging, colouring and patternmaking. As used generally within the eld, urban has a wide and inclusive meaning, embracing not only the city and town but also the village and hamlet, while design, is as much about effective problem solving and/or the processes of delivering or organising development, as about narrow aesthetics or particular physical outcomes.

UNDERSTANDING URBAN DESIGN

From the early 1960s, a clutch of writers and designers e notably Jane Jacobs, Kevin Lynch, Gordon Cullen, Christopher Alexander, Aldo Rossi, Ian McHarg, Jan Gehl and others e became inuential in shaping what would increasingly become known as urban design. The term itself had been coined in North America in the late 1950s and is often associated with Jose Luis Sert, Dean of Harvards Graduate School of Design, convening an urban

FIGURE 1.1 Gammel Strand, Copenhagen (Image: Steve Tiesdell)

FIGURE 1.2 St Andrews Square, Edinburgh (Image: Steve Tiesdell)

Public Places Urban Spaces. DOI: 10.1016/B978-1-85617-827-3.10001-X Copyright 2010, 2003, Matthew Carmona, Steve Tiesdell, Tim Heath & Taner Oc. Published By Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

PART | I

Dening Urban Design

FIGURE 1.3 Chicago (Image: Matthew Carmona)

Discussing denitions of urban design, Madanipour (1996: 93e117) identied seven areas of ambiguity:
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environment comes about; seen normatively, it is e or should be e the process by which better urban environments come about. Confusion comes because those in-the-know (designers) will often skip between these forms of use, but others (often social scientists) fail to make this distinction. Urban designs scope is broad. Indicating the potential scope and diversity of urban design, and attempting to sum up the remit of urban design in simple terms, Tibbalds (1988a) suggested it was Everything you can see out of the window. While this statement has a basic truth and logic, if everything can be considered to be urban design, then equally perhaps nothing is urban design (see Dagenhart & Sawicki 1994). There is, however, little value in putting boundaries around the subject. The real need is for denitions encapsulating its heart or core rather than prescribing its edge or boundary e that is, for the identication, clarication and debate of its central beliefs and activities. To explore the source of some of this confusion, urban design can be considered in terms of discipline and geographical scale. (i) Discipline In terms of discipline, it is frequently easier to say what urban design is not than precisely what it is. It is not, for example, big architecture, small-scale planning, civic beautication, urban engineering, a pattern-book subject, just visual/aesthetic in its scope, only a public sector concern, nor a narrow selfcontained discipline. Despite this, relational denitions e those dening something in relation to something else e can help us to get closer to what it is. Urban design, for example, is typically dened in terms of architecture and town planning e Gosling & Maitland (1984) described it as the common ground between these disciplines, while the UKs former Social Science Research Council located it at
. the interface between architecture, landscape architecture and town planning, drawing on the design tradition of architecture and landscape architecture, and the environmental management and social science tradition of contemporary planning. (Bentley & Butina 1991)

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Should it be focused at particular scales or levels? Should it focus only on the visual qualities of the urban environment or, more broadly, address the organisation and management of urban space? Should it simply be about transforming spatial arrangements or should it be about more deeply seated social and cultural relations between spaces and society? Should its focus be its product (the urban environment) or the process by which it is produced? Should it be the province of architects, planners or landscape architects? Should it be a public or private sector activity? Should it be an objectiveerational process (a science) or an expressiveesubjective process (an art)?

The rst three are concerned with the product of urban design, the last three concern urban design as a process, while the fourth concerns the producteprocess dilemma. Although Mandanipours ambiguities are deliberately presented as oppositional and mutually exclusive, it is often a matter of and/both rather than either/or. As we consciously shape and manage our built environments (Madanipour 1996: 117), urban designers are interested in and engaged with both process and its products. While, in practice, urban design is used to refer to all the products and processes of development, in a more restricted sense it means adding quality to both product and process. Another distinction that can be confusing is that between its use in a descriptive manner and its use in a normative manner. In the former, all urban development is ipso facto urban design; in the latter, only urban development of sufcient merit or quality is urban design. Thus, seen analytically, urban design is the process by which the urban

Urban design, however, is not simply an interface. It encompasses and sometimes subsumes a number of disciplines and activities: architecture, town planning, landscape architecture, surveying, property development, environmental management and protection, etc. As Cuthbert (2007: 185) observes, professions are always territorial, and, furthermore, frequently at the behest of professions, academic institutions offering education in professional areas inevitably also become territorial (see Table 1.1). Urban design is not, or should not be, a particular professional territory (see below).

Chapter | 1

Urban Design Today

TABLE 1.1 A Systems View of Professional Boundaries

Architecture
Denition The design of individual buildings, which are conceived primarily in terms of the design parameters of articially controlled environments.

Urban Design
An open system that uses individual architectural elements and ambient space as its basic vocabulary, and that is focused on social interaction and communication in the public realm.

Urban Planning
The agent of the state in controlling the production of land for the purposes of capital accumulation and social reproduction; in allocating sites for the collective consumption of social goods such as hospitals, schools and religious buildings; and in providing space for the production, circulation and eventual consumption of commodities.

Element (i) Structure (ii) Environment (iii) Resources (iv) Objectives (v) Behaviour Static human activity Three-dimensional (closed system) Materials energy design theory Social closure/physical protection Design parameters: articially controlled environments Morphology of space and form (history human activity) Four-dimensional (open system) Architecture ambient space social theory Social communication and interaction Dynamics of urban land markets Government bureaucracy The political economy of the state Systems of legitimation and communication To implement the prevailing ideology of power Dynamics of advanced capitalist societies

Source: Adapted from Cuthbert 2007: 189e90.

Despite some professions periodically making imperialist claims on the eld, urban design is typically collaborative and inter-disciplinary, involving an integrated approach and the skills and expertise of a wide range of actors. Some urban design practitioners argue that place is not e or should not be e a professional territory and that, rather than imbuing the creative task of designing urban places in the hands of a single all-knowing designer, it should be shared among many actors. Cowan (2001a: 9), for example, has asked:
. which profession is best at interpreting policy; assessing the local economy and property market; appraising a site or area in terms of land use, ecology, landscape, ground conditions, social factors, history, archaeology, urban form and transport; managing and facilitating a participative process; drafting and illustrating design principles; and programming the development process?

He contends that, while all these skills are likely to be needed in, say, producing an urban design framework or masterplan, they are rarely all embodied by a single professional. The best frameworks and masterplans are drawn up by a number of people with different skills working in collaboration. Urban designers typically work within a context of multiple clients, often with conicting interests and objectives,

developing as a consequence of multiple solutions to a problem, rather than a single solution. Indeed, many consider that the very term urban design places it too much within the purview of professional design experts engaging in self-conscious, knowing design, and prefer the more inclusive term place-making and, at a larger scale, city-making: terms suggesting it is more than just (professional) designers who create places and cities. Described as urban design many non-professionals struggle to see their role; described as place-making they can more easily envision their role and contribution. Urban design can thus be considered the self-conscious practice of knowing urban designers; place-making is the self-conscious and unself-conscious practice of everyone. An important distinction is between urban design (or place-making) as direct design (place-design) and urban design as indirect design or, more grandly, as political economy. In the latter, actors are involved in shaping the nature of place (place-shaping), through establishing policy, making investment decisions, managing space, etc., but may not themselves be involved in any conscious design process. Urban design encompasses both. George (1997) makes a similar distinction between rst-order design and second-order design. First-order design involves direct